Taylor Lorenz’s Power User - Can Twitch Survive? CEO Dan Clancy at Twitchcon

Episode Date: October 22, 2025

SUPPORT ME ON PATREON!!! Get bonus episodes and more. Buy a subscription to my Tech and Online Culture newsletter, User Magazine to support my work!!!! 🙏 As live-streaming becomes an increasingly dominant form of entertainment, Twitch is at a crossroads. Dan Clancy is the CEO of Twitch, and I sat down with him this weekend at Twitchcon to discuss how Twitch is evolving, its broader role in the creator economy over the next 10 years, competition from Hollywood, AI, and how he thinks about balancing streamers' creative freedom with safety concerns. Here's our interview.If you like this video, please support me on Patreon!! Follow me:https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz    https://www.instagram.com/taylorlorenz3.0   https://www.tiktok.com/@taylorlorenz

A lot of their rise has come because they just literally will create hundreds of clips from a single stream, often posting them while the stream is still alive. As live streaming becomes an increasingly dominant form of entertainment, Twitch is out of crossroads. On one hand, the platform is an undeniable powerhouse in the live streaming space. It has evolved from a primarily desktop streaming platform to a mobile streaming app that facilitates hours of just chatting and IRL streams. Soon, you'll even be able to stream to Twitch via Meta's AI Rayband Smart Glasses. But not everything is rosy. The platform has struggled to effectively monetize, monthly usage has fallen off since 2020 peaks, and it's facing increased competition from TikTok Live and YouTube.

The culture on Twitch has also been called toxic and hostile for women creators. Dan Clancy is the CEO of Twitch, and it's his job to navigate these choppy waters. He sat down with me this weekend at TwitchCon to discuss, how Twitch is evolving, its broader role in the creator economy over the next 10 years, increased competition from Hollywood, and how he thinks about balancing streamers' creative freedom with safety concerns. Here's our interview. Dan, thanks so much for chatting with me. Great to meet you.

Also, huge thank you to stream elements for setting all of itself because I could not get instead of myself. First of all, I want to ask you, how would you define Twitch's mission in 2025? I think our mission in 2025 is more relevant than ever, and it fits. You know, as we talk about creating belonging through our streamers in the communities they create. I often talk about how in many ways social media has become antisocial. Sitting and swiping in your phone doesn't connect you to people. And I think that's one reason why we've seen this enthusiasm around Twitch. Because I think people more than never are looking for authentic connections with both other people.

But also with the people, you know, in this creator economy, there's a distance when you're just watching something on, you know, a short form platform. And there's an authenticity that, you know, you can't hide when you stream. And so I think it's really going to the roots of what has made the foundation of Twitch, which is really community. I feel like every app has been entering the live streaming space lately. I mean, obviously TikTok's been investing so heavily in live. We've got substack live now even. We're also seeing a lot more multi-streaming, right?

Which is, you know, sort of becoming more of a thing. How do you think Twitch differentiates itself in this, like, increasingly crowded live-streaming market? Now, everybody building a live-streaming market. streaming, it's actually been happening actually for quite some time. You know, there's a period when YouTube, part of Google, Facebook, and Microsoft were all coming after Twitch. They were all doing big contracts to recruit our top streamers and Twitch stayed on top. Mixer shut down. Facebook just sunsetted their live streaming Facebook live. It's still a valuable part of YouTube. And as you said, TikTok's doing it now. But I think the reason we were able to stay where we were during that period is the same reason why now, I actually

think it's good for us. Twitch is a community-centric live streaming app and we focus on live streaming and it's really important that the way you get a sense of community is that shared experience together and that requires people to pull up and share and stay for a while. If you're watching live streaming on one of the other platforms, if you take TikTok, you watch it, you've been programmed that if you get a little bored, your mind just says, come on, swipe. Let's see what's next, right? If you're watching a YouTube video live and you get a little bored, your eyes glance to the bottom right. I was joking once with T-Pain. I said, you know who your big competition is on YouTube?

It's this guy named T-Pain. He makes really good Vod's. And someone's watching you live and your eye just drifts. Because again, you're programmed whenever you're watching a video, when you're watching VODs, to look to the bottom right. And so then you don't get that sense of community. And so I always say if people are just every now and then dabbling, it's like use whatever platform.

But if you want to build a community that like is really there for you, then do it on Twitch. And once you build a community, it's yours because the affinity on Twitch is with the creator, not the platform. If I asked you, who are your top five TikTok creators? You'd have a glazed look over your face because you wouldn't be able to think of five that are your top five. If you ask any Twitch fan, who are your top five Twitch streamers? They'll give you the answer right away because the affinity is with the creator. And so we feel really good. And I think other people being in this space, it's more people to

live streaming, both from a viewer side and from a creator side. So I think it just helps us. I feel like, I mean, part of what you're talking about TikTok and YouTube, though, is the discovery aspect. And those platforms have succeeded so successfully in discovery. What are you doing from a Twitch standpoint in terms of boosting discovery? Are you leaning into more algorithmic recommendations? Like, what are you doing to ensure that new streamers can find their audiences and build that community? Yeah, so part of this is so many platforms, they just look at themselves when they view the world. And it just makes no sense.

You need to think of yourself in a broader ecosystem and don't just stare at yourself. And everybody wants to say, well, I want everybody to do everything on my app. That's not what the user wants. So we absolutely are focusing on things for discovery on our app. But the difference you're talking about is more a difference of short form versus long form. And short form content, if, you know, on TikTok, you might see 2,000 creators in a week. Yeah. On YouTube, you might see 500.

On Twitch, you might see 10. And so the thing that creates the community on Twitch, the fact that you stay on the live stream in a long form experience is the thing that makes discovery hard. So we absolutely are investing in helping people create clips, but we're very clear we don't want to, you know, be a short form content. We are a live platform. That's why you get community. So we're investing for our platform, but a big part is also getting people to take their content from cool stuff that happens on Twitch, posted on other platforms, because you want your content to find your audience. And that's no different if you create a podcast, right? And you distribute your podcast through various different platforms, but then you create shorts.

that you'll put on TikTok because that's how you are finding your audience, not just new viewers, that's also how you stay top of mind with your existing viewers. You talked about the kind of the unique bond that people have, and I've seen it so much firsthand of like this very deep parisocial bond, I would say, with Twitch streamers really specifically, I think that reaches a level that doesn't even happen on platforms like YouTube and others. Obviously, we saw one Twitch streamer yesterday, Emory, get assaulted by a male fan.

And a lot of streamers, especially female streamers, have talked about the danger that they feel from these sort of toxic, I guess, parisocial kind of creeps. What are you guys doing to prioritize safety? Because I know also a bunch of Twitch content creators said that they were too scared to even come to TwitchCon this year, just in case something like what happened yesterday, what happened?

Yeah. So the safety of our creators is the top priority. The challenge we face is a challenge in today's society. It's not limited to Twitch. It extends throughout our society. I do think that when you're live streaming, In many ways, since you control your community and you can ban people, you can, you know, make it so that those people that you don't want engaging with you and participating with you aren't there. You know, when I use other short form content and people say all sorts of stuff, well, I can't stop that. But when I live stream, they basically don't bother me.

Now, what happened yesterday, obviously, was something that we care deeply about securing this environment. You know, we're looking very closely at everything that happened there. And I care deeply about Emmy. She's a friend of mine. And so I want to see how we can support her to do that. This is just something we have to keep working on. I think everyone identifies our tools in terms of trust and safety as the leaders in the industry about helping creators. But that means there's always more work to be done because that's the world we live in now.

Demi had posted earlier today that I guess this fan was allowed to cross multiple barriers at TwitchCon. Why should, I guess, streamers trust Twitch to keep them safe at TwitchCon? Because I feel like simultaneously this has been such a secure event to the point that even like journalists have had struggle. You know, it is very secure, but, you know, here's this man that just walks up and is somehow able to bypass all these things. So why should they trust the platform when slipups are, you know, issues like this have happened? Right. Well, I mean, as you know, I think you toured some of what we do in terms of security. The reality is even as you do a lot in terms of security in today's world, there are challenges that can present themselves, especially when someone is putting themselves out there, right? And so, you know, we try to work very closely with each creator about what they want to do and what works for,

them. So I don't want to get into any specifics or details, but part of that is working with creators and, you know, trying to find it right now, we're definitely, you know, ramping it up to make sure creators know that we have the resources there to help them figure out what's right for them. We've also seen this record assault on free speech by the Trump administration and efforts to increasingly target online speech, obviously targeting platforms like yours. What are you doing to protect freedom of expression on the internet? The good news is so far, I think we already were in a slightly different place. You know, we have a set of community guidelines that focus not on what you say, but how you say it, okay? And we're very serious about trying to figure out how to apply

those consistently across. And so far, we have not had any challenges in terms of the areas you're talking about. I think that's in part because, you know, we've always been sort of balanced in terms of that. And I think there's something about live that makes it, you know, less prone to some of the challenges that happen on other platforms. They tried to, for some reason, involve you guys in Charlie Kirksoff wanted to haul you in front of Congress. I think that that hearing is sort of indefinitely postponed. But are you doing anything to sort of proactively ensure that you can sort of protect the people on your platform from government pressures around speech?

Yeah, the interesting thing is, as you talk about, proactively do it, the biggest thing is you have to be able, you need to be ready to respond when there's a challenge, right? So we are, if that happens, again, it hasn't happened. I think people express a wide range of views on the platform and there hasn't been a big issue there, but we're ready if something does, you know, challenges. Why do you think that you guys got dragged into that when it wasn't, it was like sort of following the Charlie Kirk shooting. There wasn't, didn't seem to be any connection. There's no connection. I think it's purely what I'll call is company association. They need some number of end people.

If you did a cluster of companies that, you know, end up having users that overlap and you had Reddit and Discord and Steam and you say, tell me the fourth company. And you can't mention one of the, the big ones because you have that balance. You can't mention X or Facebook or you do. Then it's like, well, what's the fourth? So it's proximity. I don't think, to me, I'm not, I'm not that worried about it because I think, you know, he had no experience.

We do not have this problem of radicalization on Twitch. It's a public forum. We don't have these private groups. One way to think of it is if you really view this from an honest and sincere, sincere perspective, these things are trying to get information. And to be honest, they probably don't know that much about Twitch.

Yeah. Right? They're not Twitch users. So I feel really good that we have in terms of them trying to understand this landscape. They'll realize, oh, Twitch doesn't really fit with these other ones. Yeah. I mean, I feel like we're talking about a group of lawmakers that probably don't know how to turn their computers on.

So I don't know how familiar they are with Twitch. I mean, it seems like a lot of people in Congress are certainly familiar with figures like Hassan Piker, who was brought up at the mayoral debate for some God knows reason why. And I'm sure it's like when you look at top talent and also, efforts to de-platform top talent, especially from, not just from the government, but these really intense, like, pressure campaigns that come from sort of like other big voices online, even the media, to de-platform, censor people. How do you guys navigate that as a platform? And what do you do to ensure that big creators can continue to remain on Twitch? Because we've seen other platforms

cave to public pressure to de-platform their own creators. Right, right, right. I think a big part of it is having a clear North Star. Like, you need to understand what your policy is and what you think is right, and then you need to be willing to just consistently apply it. The reality is in today's social media world, no matter what you do, there will be those people who want to attack you in some. So you can't make decisions to avoid any type of backlash from some vocal group.

No matter what decision you make, you're going to have that. So given that, you can't do it by trying to avoid or band or whatever, right? You just have to say, okay, what do we think is right for our platform? And then just stick to your guns in over time, that's going to make sure you can continue what you're doing. Because as you say, it's important for our creators to feel like we're going to consistently apply these things. Yeah, I mean, I feel like that is so well and good and obviously agree with you. But then it's really hard. And I empathize with executives going through this when you are in the midst of those campaigns and people are calling your advertisers, right?

Or targeting these people to really hold firm. And I'm curious, you know, have you ever, has it ever been difficult to navigate that, especially with Amazon as a sort of a parent company as well? Well, I mean, I think Amazon's been very supportive. Some of this is you just got to play the long game. That's one thing I have to do. At times, people will attack me. And you just need to look forward and realize, nope, keep going, play the long game. This is the world we live in now.

Yeah. Speaking of Amazon, you know, Twitch sort of started out or was required a long time ago, right? It's sort of build out Amazon gaming. It's sort of gone through like all these different iterations. I'm curious, you know, I think Twitch has had four years of declining users struggling to make a profit. How should creators feel about the future of Twitch? And, you know, Amazon is, have you ever worried, I guess, that they're concerned about the fact that Twitch isn't growing or that it's not meeting their ultimate goals? Well, this is I'd say, the one part of as you're saying that I would disagree with in terms of when you say struggling to make a profit.

Okay. Ultimately, the question is, do we have a sustainable business that works? Part of what we've been doing is looking really closely at how we run the business, right? We used to have a different approach in terms of doing these contracts with creators that were expensive. And we made a number of, you know, tough choices, like Korea, which was not something that because of the streaming costs. And actually, I feel very good about where our business is right now, you know, in terms of what I'll call is the sustainability. We don't talk about where we're at now in terms of, you know, profitability is this one point in time. Really what you want to do is understand, does our business work?

When you look at the cost of content, the cost of streaming, the cost of running the service, you know, we've made like we've slimmed down our organization. So I feel actually extremely good about the health of the business. In fact, we've been doing very well in terms of the health of the business continuing to ensure it's sustainable. It is the fact that, you know, with the broader dynamics after COVID, but it's interesting, and I don't have it right here, when I look at the, you know, the curve of our usage, if you just ignore, these peaks during COVID, you still see this pattern like this. Right? If you like drew a line from what was happening before COVID.

So you're talking about like 2020 basically. So 2020, right, right. If you look at 2016, if you look at a group 2016, 17, 18, 19, like, and then you look here, you see what's a, what's a line. It's just it happened to do this, right? And I think that's because people had so much time. And then they, you know, they were still connected and slowly, you know, You know, with Twitch, it just kind of slowly, you know, drifted it out. But what we actually see the interesting thing, and when you look at what I'll call the kind of cultural significance of Twitch, it's never been higher.

Yeah. Right? And so too often, I think we get caught up in these one metrics, right? Especially the ones that third party services can ping. You know, third party services don't see how much money our creators are making. That's not in our API. And by the way, third party services, because they don't actually, they're actually estimating based upon like when we eliminate viewbots, third party services detect that as your ship going

down. It's like, no, viewership didn't go down. Our internal metrics were never, you know, dealing with these viewbots. It's just you were dealing with them. And now we eliminate them. So now you infer this. And it's like, no, we don't have fewer people. Creators revenues are not, had not gone down.

So it's a noisy signal when you look at that. But if you think from a cultural impact, it's never been bigger. I would agree with that. I recently wrote actually about this in the Hollywood Reporter about kind of like the impact of live. And it seems like live is this like ascendant format. At the same time, we're entering this new era of social media, though, that is so like AI driven. And it seems like this era of mass broadcast social maybe is also sort of more like declining. Like people are not so interested in like posting publicly to everyone all the time. There's the rise of private social platforms. So I'm curious how you think about that cultural relevance and building that cultural relevance and maintaining that cultural relevance into the next like decade as we have the rise of all these. new sort of like synthetic, you know, forms of media.

Well, you know, of course, you never know how these things evolve. And I think any business is prone to see the positives as they think through these futures and say, yeah, but it's good for me, right? That's just it. But I mean, I honestly do think in terms of what makes us tick as human beings, we evolved to seek community. That's how we survived. And every part of our being is designed to connect with other people.

And there are these things that. hack that and give the impression of that. But an AI bot is not connecting with another person. It isn't. And so, like, for example, whenever people talk about AI and Twitch, I'm like, I'm not worried about AI bots taking over Twitch. If all I'm looking at is a photo, I didn't actually have a good, you know, there's a photo on Instagram.

That's actually not a real connection. It's a two-dimensional photograph, right? And so, yeah, the two-dimensional photograph, that maybe AI, you know, takes over two-dimensional photograph. But I will say we are four-dimensional people, because obviously we live in three. three-dimensional space, but in fact, all the emotion, everything else about who we are and how we change. And so I actually think with all those changes, it's almost like it fits perfectly because more and more people are going to be yearning for some type of authenticity in their lives with other people.

One thing that I've noticed a lot is Twitch is very male oriented. It seems like there's a lot of male creators. When I spend time in more female-oriented, I guess, live-stream spaces, like the Like-to-know-it app, you know, has this like live-stream space, TikTok shop is huge. How do you think about like cultivating that female creator of viewership? And are you thinking live streaming shopping is so popular and it is really popular. And especially with the lifestyle, women lifestyle influencers, are you leaning into that at all or experimenting in those spaces? You know, I don't know the exact stats and plus we can get them.

But more and more in terms of our viewer base, it's more and more women, right? Same thing in terms of, I'm streaming. You look right now on the trip up here where you've got Sinha and Extra Emily and Emmy and Bonnie doing a trip together. there's just lots of women that are doing well in streaming. It is the fact that sometimes pure hours watched, gaming generates a lot of bulk in hours watched, right? And it's probably the case that many of these women streamers are really diversity. They do diversifying. They tend to be variety streamers.

One thing that I've said broadly about our platform, we have evolved from being entertaining gamers to entertainers that game. And so I think sometimes the metrics can be a little misleading. Because it is the fact that there is some that can be, you know, where the metrics, because gaming still can generate a lot of hours watch. But if you look at the clips on Twitch, and I don't have this, suppose I was able to measure third-party clip viewership on Twitch. I think you would see a lot of third-party clip viewership of women's streamers. We see that.

We have an effort bringing over lots of folks that have been building on other platforms, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and a lot of women streamers there. So, A, I do think that as live streaming evolves, interestingly, I think it's better suited for women, streamers, and viewers. That kind of community connection is a role that often women have played in our society, right? And when you think of other shows, other things,

I think live streaming fits well for that. Well, the women, I mean, the content creator industry as a whole is female-dominated and was built by women and continues to be done. And community, in other words, in other words, this kind of desire for community is something that is very, fits very naturally. So I see as we continue to evolve kind of more broadly.

Yeah. I see women playing a bigger and bigger role. You bring up shopping. It's something we're always keeping an eye on. Obviously, it's really big in China. Amazon has a, you know, a live shopping. Yes. Which a lot of female influencers are on.

Yeah. And have found huge success. Yeah. Yeah. So that's something where how do we bring them over to Twitch, you know, so it's something that, yes, we're thinking through and keeping an eye on. It is a different space, you know, but I do think there's opportunity there.

What do you think the future of live streaming is going to look like in five years or even 10 years down the line? I think it's this idea. If you look at where we've been, in general live streaming, I've been dominated at people who are first and foremost streamers. I think that is in part because of the origins. When live streaming started, of course, gaming. Every of the competitors started out as general live streaming apps. I was at YouTube when we started YouTube Live. It was a general live streaming app.

It really became a gaming. Facebook Live was a general live streaming. It became gaming. Twitch was Justin TV. It became gaming. The world has gone full circle, interestingly, from where all the apps started. But it's still the case that most of the people who,

they're first and foremost streamers. I think the change you're seeing now is more and more people using live streaming as a secondary conduit of engaging their audience community or whatever. So if you go through five to 10 years, I think you just have more and more people that they may not be streaming 20 hours a week or 30 hours a week, but they're like, yeah, no, I need to stream three hours a week if you take musicians, right?

Musicians used to have this that write an album, that tour, that disappear for two years, and they'd come back. That's not the world we live in, right? They need to stay connected to their community. And more and more, I think, look, if you have a fan base, like, engage authentically with them, don't just, you don't have to just play music. Do something you love, right? knit. So I think you'll see more, and we see that right now when you see, you know, the stud buds with WNBA. Love the stud buds. Yeah. Like, obsessed with that. I think that is the poster

child. Think of more and more these folks that are doing it when it works for them. But they don't have to do it all the time. And so every, you know, if I'd say with five to ten years, it's like everyone that's an entertainer, athlete, musician, influencer. So streaming just becomes another content format, almost like short form is a content format. I agree with you on that, actually. And I think that that has, people have been predicting that switch to happen. And I don't think it's, I mean, since 2015 as even before, but I think you're probably right. Another thing that, you know, is big right now in social, in this sort of creator world, is this shift in this sort

of like merging with traditional Hollywood. You're at the screen time conference last week. And it seems like a lot of these social platforms and really the creators on the social platforms are doing these big time deals with, you know, Darmand doing like a two-be deal. Samsung is giving all these deals to creators. like it seems like there's just this merging. What do you think of this sort of like merging of traditional entertainment with the creator space?

So obviously we encourage it. I think it's a great opportunity for our creators. I think the world is just becoming more what I'll call creator-centric. And I think that is about that kind of connection. When you think of Hollywood movies, right, a movie creates a character. It's not who the actor is, right? But more and more you see these people where it's who they are

that is appealing to people. Right? I often say if you look at Kevin Hart, Kevin Hart in some ways is IP. Yeah. Right. Kai is IP, right? And the world is moving more and more where people want connection to the,

by creator, that includes actor, right? In terms of who they are. And you see that by now having these creators now, having these vehicles, but these vehicles are usually focused on them. They aren't really actors taking on some other character. Yeah. They are who they are. And I often say, I mean, really, the rise of podcasting is the rise of the creator economy.

And even as a podcast, it's a creator-centric. It's premium UGC content. Which we're seeing these podcasts now, you know, moving to Netflix and etc. And hopefully we see a lot more. I feel like one thing that's shifted in the past few years on Twitch is this more structured programming, like Streamer University or something like really like obviously what Kai is doing so much in his like sub-athons and stuff. Could you see something like that, like getting that content onto like a streamer? Absolutely.

I think that I think all these things are meeting like Netflix platform I know I know absolutely I think all these things are kind of blending and merging and we used to have this concept of premium and UGC as phrases the way I describe it is there's a parameter which is how many human hours go into create an hour of content so if you create a podcast it might be 50 okay somebody showing up waking up turning on their computer and starting to game it might be 1.01 because they They just came, they stop, they're done, they're the only one. Avatar, the movie, it might be 100,000. I don't know what it is, right?

But there isn't any line. Streamer University took more human hours for every hour of content. Mafiathon took a certain number, right? Reality TV, interesting is like starting from there and coming this way. And when you, it's like, okay, we want something that's a little cheaper sometimes to produce

than some of the stuff we were creating before. And so what you have is the two sides are just kind of coming like. like that. And then there are different platforms, but I think the idea is these platforms will be overlapping. And our specialty will always be community. We talk with Prime Video as an example. You know, we've talked about various ideas that there's, I won't say who is talking about with some ideas with them. And part of it is creatively thinking, okay, but if you really want community, those platforms aren't community platforms. So that you're not going to get. So how do you, you know,

and so a lot of the blend is saying out, but I still want that community in that line. Last question, I think so I don't have much time. What emergent trends are you seeing sort of in the creator space coming up on Twitch? Like what sort of interesting user behaviors are you noticing trends that you think are interesting and worth paying attention to? Well, the most interesting one is all that's happening in the clipping world. That's one reason why we're doing the auto clips. If you look at, you know, groups like Faze or Marlin or Jinksie and I've talked to all them, a lot of their rise has come because they just literally will create hundreds of clips from a single stream. often posting them while the stream is still live.

I think that's something that is really a big part now. And that's one reason why we're investing to make it easier, not just for big creators, but medium and small creators to do that. The clipping stuff is really insane. It is wild. There's all these clipping agencies and everything. Dan, thank you so much for your time. All right.

Well, thank you, Taylor. All right, that's it for this week's show. Thank you so much again to stream elements for helping me record and broadcast this interview. And if you like my content, please support me on Patreon via the link below. You can also buy a paid subscription to my tech and online culture newsletter at usermag.co. That's usermag.co. My newsletter is also available through my Patreon. I don't have any brand partnerships right now, so truly every single dollar of your support makes such a massive difference, and it is the reason that I can continue to do this work.

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